Massachusetts is lowering its COVID death count by 3,700 — because they changed how they were determining COVID deaths.
Deaths of people who had a positive diagnosis between 31 and 60 days before their death no longer count.
Now, it’s only a COVID death if there was a COVID diagnosis up to 30 days before their death.
Massachusetts is dropping its COVID-19 death count by 3,700 people after adopting new criteria for determining deaths caused by the virus.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health said Thursday that as of March 14, the state will update its criteria “to align with guidance from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.”
Under the old criteria, the COVID-19 death definition applies not only to people who have COVID-19 listed as a cause of death on their death certificate, but also people who had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 60 days of their death but do not have COVID-19 listed as a cause of death on their death certificate.
Massachusetts’s new definition of a COVID-19 death tightens that diagnosis timeline from 60 days to just 30 days.
The new criteria will retroactively affect all deaths in Massachusetts since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.
Nicolas Menzies, Associate Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health admitted that COVID deaths can not be identified with 100% certainty.
“It is important to understand that we cannot identify all COVID-19 deaths with 100 percent accuracy,” said Nicolas Menzies, Associate Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “The revised definition for COVID-19 deaths is a reasonable balance between sensitivity and specificity and will make it easier to compare Massachusetts death data with data from other jurisdictions.”
How many other COVID numbers will change?